1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system and a print control method, and more particularly to a printing system and a print control method which efficiently use a pull-printable printer even in a printing system, which makes distributed and divisional output, to efficiently transmit image data so to prevent a network from becoming busy.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a known printing system, there is a technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 10-271263. This system transmits image data which is read by a scanner to a local copy section of a management device before sending it to a printer.
Therefore, the system of the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 10-271263 transmits the image data two times, namely from the scanner to the management device and from the management device to the printer.
In other words, the system having such a transmission mode often makes a network busy and takes long time to start printing. Thus, the system cannot efficiently use respective devices.
In order to improve the above situation, printing devices having a function called “pull-print” are being provided in recent years.
The pull-printing function is to operate, when information indicating a location where data to be printed is stored on the network (hereinafter referred to as the “reference information”), e.g. a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), is input, to obtain data on the information according to the reference information and to perform printing according to the obtained data.
When this pull-printing function is used, a load on the network can be reduced because data to be printed is sent from its location to the printer only one time.
An example of the technology using a printing device having the above pull-printing function is disclosed as a pull-print printing device in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-184180.
The Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-184180 makes reference to the pull-print printing device but does not have a mechanism for scheduling multiple printing jobs of multiple printers and does not consider a printing system for performing distributed and divisional output.
As described above, the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-184180 refers to the pull-print printing device but does not have a mechanism for scheduling multiple printing jobs of multiple printers. Thus, conventionally no reference has been made about a printing system for performing distributed and divisional output.